One Of Ours, by Willa Cather

[Note:  Spoiler alert, because spoilers.]

This book, along with Willa Cather’s work in general, provides a strong difference between literary fiction that seeks to appeal to cultural elites and critical elements and popular fiction that is read by people for fun.  Think of what you would want to read for your personal enjoyment in a novel about World War I.  You want someone who has lived a happy and successful life?  You want someone who shows a great deal of character as well as success in fighting?  You want someone who behaves bravely and survives and is honored despite the intensity of struggle?  You want an optimistic look at the end of the war and the efforts and succeeding in the postwar world?  Forget any of that, because it doesn’t happen.  Like much literary fiction, this book is mired in the slog of unpleasant circumstances from beginning to end.  The lead character, one Claude Wheeler, spends the entire novel in a deep struggle and the end is rather pointless and not really even tragic.  The author reveals much about herself and about the decadence and faults of elite American culture even as she writes critically about society in her beloved rural Nebraska.

This book is divided into several sections, in which there are characteristic struggles and events.  The first part of the book discusses Claude’s youth and his early friendships with his neighbors, who are a diverse group of mostly Eastern and Central Europeans, including Germans and Bohemians.  (Later on these Germans suffer problems because of their lack of loyalty to the American republic during World War I.)  The second part of the book focuses on Claude’s awkward courtship of Enid, who has a flirtatious friendship with Claude but who is very reluctant to marry (why?), and who saves her passion for social causes like Prohibition and vegetarianism.  After that the author portrays a chastened and embittered Claude as struggling and disillusioned with farming and divided from his family even as World War I darkens the world in which they live.  The fourth book discusses the voyage of the Anchises, where the deadly flu outbreak begins and causes a great deal of suffering among the Midwestern soldiers on their way to France.  Finally, the last part of the book shows Claude and his fellow soldiers fighting the boche, where Claude’s heroism and that of his fellow soldiers merely earns them an early grave, ending the novel abruptly on the return of the survivors for the parades and in the lonely memories of a lost son by a grieving mother.

This book leads the reader to all kinds of questions.  Why was it that the author portrayed the spread of the flu so early so as to make Claude and his fellow doughboys as the carriers of death around the world?  Why does the author focus on an unhappy ending–why is it that Claude is portrayed as sensitive but unsuccessful in college, in his marriage, with his family, in his maintaining his faith, as a soldier, and so on?  What is the point in making Claude such a consistent failure in life despite his positive framing by the author?  Why does it feel as if this novel is a desire to excuse the novelist for failures in her own love life?  Is she imagining how she would be like as a wife, and thinking that it would be better for her and anyone she could be with to simply be alone and passionate about one’s causes?  Is the author’s continual interest in queerness an explanation for what is really going on with Enid and her reluctance to marry and an inability to be a loving wife?  Why does the author portray farming life in such a negative fashion?  Does the author really think that being a decent and honorable person means being unsuccessful in this world?  There are a lot of questions in a book like this, and precious few answers that are flattering to the author or those like her.